Heavy Water_ And Other Stories - Martin Amis [67]
The janitor on Mars stood—with a terrible backward-juddering scrape of his metal chair that had Pop Jones frowning with approval as he reached for the tin of Bovril and the spoon. At this stage, Pop’s feelings for his Martian counterpart touched many bases: from a sense of solidarity all the way to outright hero worship. The air of brusque obstructiveness, the grudge-harboring slant of his gaze; and there was something else, something subtler, that struck Pop as so quintessentially janitorial. Alertness to the threat of effort: that was it. The day has come, he thought. The day when at last the janitors—
“Now I don’t have all afternoon,” said the robot, rather unfeelingly, perhaps (his audience having spent four-and-a-half months in transit). In his black crepe-soled shoes the janitor on Mars was no more than five feet tall. Yet he filled his space with formidable conviction—a metallic self-sufficiency. He moved like a living being but he could never be mistaken for one, in any light. And while the face had an expressive range of attitudes and elevations, there was nothing human, nothing avian, nothing remotely organic in its severity. He approached the edge of the stage, saying,
“Let’s not have this degenerate into Q and A. I have a program to get through here. We’ll go thumbnail and examine our respective journeys in parallel. So: 3.7 billion years ago, life is seeded. 3.4 billion years ago, Martians, as I say, are up and running: ‘hunter-gatherers’ is your euphemism but ‘scavengers’ is closer to the truth. At this stage, of course, you’re still a bubble of fart gas. Goop. Macrobiotic yogurt left out in the sun. Five centuries go by: Mars is fully industrialized. Another five, and we entered what I guess you’d call our posthistorical phase. We called it Total Wealth. All you’re managing to do, at this stage, is stink up the estuaries and riverbeds, but meanwhile, over on Mars, we’re into quantum gravity, tired light, chromo power, trace drive, cleft conformals, scalar counterfactuals, wave superposition, and orthogonics. We were the masters of our habitat, having gotten rid of all the animals and the oceans and so forth, and the tropospherical fluctuations you call weather. In other words, we were ready.”
“Ready for what?” came a voice.
“Now I’m just a janitor, right? I’m just a, uh, ‘robot.’ At the time of my manufacture, there was on Mars no distinction between the synthetic and the organic. Everyone was a mix, semi-etherealized, self-duplicating. The natural/mechanical divide belonged to ancient memory. But what you see before you here is a robot. Of the … crudest kind. It’s as if, on Earth, in 2050, an outfit like Sony produced a gramophone with a dishful of spare needles and a tin bullhorn.” The janitor on Mars paused, nodding his lowered head. Then he looked up. “And yet my makers, in their wisdom … However. In the last five hundred million years I’ve had access to an information source that was not available to the former denizens of this planet. And with that perspective it’s quite clear that Mars was an absolutely average world of its class. A type-v world, absolutely average, and it did what type-v worlds invariably do in the posthistorical phase.”
“Sir?” said Incarnacion. “Excuse me, but is this a grading system? What’s a type-v world?”
“A world that has mined its star.”
“What type world is Earth?”
“A type-y world.”
“What are type-z worlds?”
“Dead ones. But I digress. You go posthistorical and the question is: now what? As I say, three billion three million nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand years ago, Martians were lords of all they surveyed. They were ready. Ready for what? Ready for war.”
The robot let this ripple out through the moist air, over the ranked metal seats.
“Yes, that’s right. Mars, the Planet of War. Congratulations. The only time